Re: Yet unannounced Plasma TV UI project

Hi,

> as the product itself is not ready for release

I would agree.

Just from a cursory look:
* The proposed Plasma Bigscreen website links to a not-KDE company bug tracker for issue tracking and not-KDE forums.

* It's not clear to me where this website is hosted and whether it's been aligned with KDE's WWW team, who have worked hard in recent months to make our websites more consistent. Collaboration would I think be welcome there, especially for a satellite project to an existing community brand (Plasma).

* From a product marketing POV, I'm surprised at the proposed announcement text calling out "Plasma Nano" as the thing for embedded Plasma development. I'm not aware of a conversation where it was established that Plasma needs a sub-brand for embedded (brand != code bits; saying you need something called Plasma Nano for embedded makes Plasma un-embedded). It invites questions I don't see prep for - Plasma Nano has no website or FAQ anywhere.

* Between the website and the announcement, there's a concept of "Bigscreen Apps" enabled by a distinct API set from Plasma's APIs (the Mycroft APIs). This also has implications and begs questions - is the Plasma API set (we've used terms like "mini-apps" for Plasma widgets before) insufficient for this use case? Why? This may have pragmatic answers related to integrating two technologies, but those answers need to be written out or they dilute messaging around the Plasma brand  

* On the Telemetry/Privacy front it's a similar story of "at the very least, have the answers ready". We have other projects that depend on Google APIs (e.g. kio-gdrive), but they need less careful communication as they're inherently tied to Google products/brands. With something like the Bigscreen case it needs a message how this related to the Telemetry policy and what mitigations are there (e.g. an architecture not tied to those APIs and allowing for other backends).

This all feels a bit hodge-podge and very rushed. My suggestion would be that instead of taking the project to the public under the KDE mantle as very first step, this needs a starter period of being introduced to the KDE/Plasma community and for the community to decide whether it wants to embrace it (or can embrace it - the announcement cites Mycroft as a participant, but the divison of governance is unclear to me) and help develop a product narrative around it that appears to incomplete-to-missing.


Cheers,
Eike



March 23, 2020 4:18 PM, "Paul Brown" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> As it turns out, the discussion about the name of the product is premature at 
> this moment, as the product itself is not ready for release, at least not 
> officially as a KDE product, with its dot article and posts through the official 
> KDE social media accounts.
> 
> The product uses proprietary Google technology so, as it stands, it would not 
> pass the FLOSS smell test and can be seen by people outside our orbit as a 
> front-end to Google spyware.
> 
> We already had quite a bit of (unjustified) negative press regarding the 
> telemetry options shipped with 5.18. If we make an official announcement about 
> this product now, it would be further proof for the anti-KDE crowd that we are 
> sliding down the slippery slope of spying on our users.
> 
> My recommendation is this: the developers make it a blog post, the blog post 
> can go through the planet and Promo can echo it, re-tweet it, boost it, or 
> whatever, explaining that this is a project that is WiP. This will still 
> attract the intention of users and companies who are interested in these kind 
> of things.
> 
> I would also recommend that the blog post include the information about the 
> Google back-end explicitly and clearly, explaining how this is a temporary 
> solution, and information about how developers intend to solve this problem 
> down the line.
> 
> When the product manages to remove the Google back-end and uses, for example, 
> Mozilla's voice data, we can confidently make an official announcement via KDE's 
> own outlets and not have to put up with any blowback.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Paul
> -- 
> Promotion & Communication
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Best regards,
Eike Hein
-
KDE e.V. vice president, treasurer